i have a serious brain disease. please bring me a cat.
I think somewhere in a previous post I threatened to eat some raw kale. And I did too. A big ol’ pile of it with leftover tofu from this meal cubed on top. Some sliced carrots and slivered almonds thrown on just for fun. And a side of brussels sprouts because I love them.
Yes, this is an exceptionally lazy post. But hey, I haven’t missed a day yet!
As the weather gets warmer, I enjoy lighter dinners. After two nights of the avocado grapefruit salad and then sushi at Rusan’s I moved on to a lovely Mediterranean Kale Salad from Raw Food Made Easy. I love raw kale and I don’t know why I don’t eat it more.
So how did I negate any possible health benefits I got from eating this lovely plate of greens? I made peanut butter cookies. With chocolate chips in ’em. And ate four. If you haven’t tossed chocolate chips into your favorite peanut butter cookie recipe yet, you’re missing out.
I don’t feel very writey right now, but here are a few food pics that have been piling up.
The Cajun Tofu from Yellow Rose Recipes has turned out to be a great quick week night dinner star. Once you have the spice mixture around, the rest can be made up of staples I keep around. This time we had it with some of the collards that are filling my freezer and some hash browns that cooked up quicker because I diced ’em smaller. Oh, and that’s a little bowl of home made apple sauce.
When I saw this fairly quick recipe for bread bowls, I knew I’d eventually be dumping come Cholent from Veganomicon into them. I was right! The dry milk powder was replaced with soy milk powder.
Trying to keep the healthy cruise diet going, I baked up some Asian tofu and ate it on a salad of raw kale and bok choy seasoned with sesame oil.
And finally, this Peanut Butter Quick Bread recipe looked interesting. I thought it would be even more interesting as Peanut Butter and Jelly Bread. So that’s what I did. The bread itself is not all that sweet like a lot of quick breads, so the jelly does not make it too sweet. I veganized by using a flax egg and soy milk as replacements. The recipe worked in both bread and muffin form.
So it seems like a month ago or something that I put out tweets that I was making seitan sausages and buns from scratch. It seems kind of weird to say “from scratch” considering that’s about how I cook everything. Anyway, I usually don’t go so far as to make my own hot dog buns. But then, here they are:
I used Bryanna’s Fluffy But High Fiber Hamburger and Hotdog Bun recipe. For the first ingredient, I used EnergE Egg Replacer because I didn’t have the other things and it’s mostly potato starch anyway. Seemed to work fine. These are all full of whole grains and yet not heavy. I’m not sure I’d call them fluffy exactly, but they are really nice. One thing they don’t do is keep a little “hinge” when you slice them like store bought hotdog buns. I didn’t really think of that. In the future, I’ll experiment with shaping these so the sausage can be wrapped in bread. Even so, the sausages weren’t too messy to eat.
The sausages? Right, I made the steamed seitan sausages that every other vegan food blogger did months ago and probably already has a freezer full of them. I just used Julie Hasson’s original recipe. Next time I’d probably punch up the seasoning a little. I like a really spicy sausage. These had great flavor though. Steaming them was no problem. I just used one of those metal steamer baskets that you fit into the bottom of a pot to steam vegetables. Even though the bottom is rounded and not flat, I was able to stack all the sausages from this recipe into my pasta pot without a problem.
Don’t be freaked out when you first unwrap these from the foil. They’re still moist on the outside but dry out pretty quickly. I’ve had them both right out of the fridge and into the George Foreman grill and frozen, defrosted partially, then into the grill. It’s crazy convenient to have these just hanging out in your freezer. Sometime soon I’ll incorporate them into some other recipe rather than simply eating on a bun.
Oh, and that’s the Cabbage Kale Slaw from Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen next to it. And here’s a slaw extreme close up:
I had the slaw a couple of days later for lunch at work with sunflower seeds sprinkled on it. It held up just fine and possibly got a little better.
Yes, there’s more food. Asian Baked Tofu from The Candle Cafe Cookbook, Teriyaki Quinoa from Eat, Drink & Be Vegan, and some stir fried baby bok choy.
Jimmy Crack Corn Crack from Alternative Vegan and Chipotle Kissed Red Bean Sweet Potato Chili from Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker.
